Mix tape, anyone? The cassette turns 50

By Todd Leopold, CNN

Updated 2213 GMT (0613 HKT) September 12, 2013

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

50 years of the cassette – In 1963, Philips Electronics officially introduced the "compact cassette," which contained a length of audio tape approximately 3.15 millimeters wide that ran at 1-7/8 inches per second. It was intended to replace the bulkier reel-to-reel tape and be used for dictation, but over the next 50 years, it would prove to be far more versatile. Lou Ottens, shown here, led Philips' team.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Keith Richards' secret weapon – One of the cassette's early supporters was Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who bought an early machine to record off-the-cuff demos. He liked it so much that he used it to record the layered guitar parts for such songs as 1968's "Street Fighting Man" and "Jumping Jack Flash," overloading his machine for distortion. "I wish I could still do that, but they don't build machines like that anymore," he wrote in his memoir, "Life."

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

The 8-track challenge – For more than a decade, the cassette's chief competition in the portable tape market was the 8-track cartridge, invented in 1964. Eight-tracks were divided into four programs, each with two-track stereo (hence 8 tracks). Automobile manufacturers adopted the 8-track quickly, but the format had its flaws -- it wasn't rewindable and the programs sometimes split songs in two. By the late '70s, the cassette had won the tape war.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Forward motion – The car was a major driver of the cassette's popularity. Some cars had tried offering phonographs, but the needle would skip with every bump of the road. Cassettes were portable and easy to use. Suddenly, drivers no longer had to listen to their AM/FM radios, but could play tapes of music they liked.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

'Is it live ... ?' – An ongoing problem with cassettes was fidelity -- they just didn't have the same capabilities as LPs or reel-to-reel tapes. But as the technology improved, manufacturers pushed to showcase the cassette's audio possibilities. One of the most famous ad campaigns was from Memorex, a tape manufacturer that used Ella Fitzgerald's vocals to ask the question, "Is it live? Or is it Memorex?"

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Blown away – Maxell, another tape manufacturer, promoted its fidelity through an iconic photograph of a man sitting in a chair, literally being blown away by the quality (and probably the loudness) of his taped music. For years, makers such as Maxell, TDK and Denon touted the abilities of their tapes and the magnetic substances that coated them.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Tape snarls – There were drawbacks to cassettes. If your equipment was misbehaving, your tape could start unwinding in the machine, leaving you with a mess. The classic way to get the cassette back to normal was to stick a standard hexagonal pencil in a tape spool and spin it to tighten the tape back together. If the tape was broken, however, you were probably out of luck.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Singled out – The UK band Bow Wow Wow, led by 14-year-old Annabella Lwin, put out "C-30 C-60 C-90 Go," the first cassette single, in 1980. It was a celebration of taping that had a caustic edge: the lyrics promoted home taping, which record companies associated with piracy.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Arising from the Dead – The record companies weren't necessarily wrong. Many people borrowed LPs from friends and made their own tapes from them; others took their tape recorders to concerts and made bootleg live recordings, which were then traded or sold on the black market. At least one band, the Grateful Dead, turned the practice into a virtue, however. The Dead encouraged fans to tape their shows, leading to a thriving exchange that continues to this day ... though the technology has changed.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Mixing it up – Who needed a radio station or DJ to play music? With cassettes, you could make your own "mix tape" and use it to romance prospective dates, impress new friends or simply entertain yourself. There was an art to the mix tape, from establishing the flow of one song into the next to simply making sure that you didn't run out of time on your C-90. Authors such as Nick Hornby ("High Fidelity") and Rob Sheffield ("Love Is a Mix Tape") romanticized the idea.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

The personal player – Sony's introduction of the Walkman in 1979 revolutionized music consumption. No more plugging your headphones into a component stereo; now you could listen to your tapes on the go. The device was the forerunner of other personal music players, including the Discman (Sony's personal CD player) and Apple's iPod.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

The boombox – In some respects, the boombox was the opposite of the Walkman, a giant radio and cassette player with huge speakers. You could, of course, play it in your dorm room, but more common was to tote it around in public, sharing your tastes with the world. It became associated with hip-hop culture: LL Cool J's "Radio" LP featured a boombox on its cover, and Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" featured a character, Radio Raheem, who carried one around.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Pop culture playback – Naturally, the cassette became prominent in popular culture. It played a key role in such movies as "Wayne's World" (where it played "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the car); "Sneakers" (as a voice ID); and, of course, "Say Anything," where John Cusack's boombox will play Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" forever.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Occasional flops – For all its versatility, the cassette wasn't always a success. The "cassingle," an attempt to replace the 45-rpm single, flopped. The UK magazine SFX marketed itself as "the only music magazine on C-60," but failed in less than a year.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Fading away in the digital age – With the rise of the CD, introduced in 1982, the cassette started fading from the music scene. In 1992, prerecorded cassettes still accounted for more than half of music sales; four years later, it was down to a quarter. When recordable CDs came out, it seemed like the cassette was doomed -- and downloadable music didn't help.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

The cassette comes back – But there's always a place for audio technologies. Underground metal acts latched on to the cassette as a lo-fi medium attuned to their needs. Major labels quickly caught on, and acts such as MGMT released recordings on cassette. Like vinyl, also left for dead a few years ago, cassettes found a new willing market.

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Photos:50 years of the cassette

Cassette Store Day – The new interest has led to Cassette Store Day, celebrated September 7. At least 100 stores participated in the promotion, and a number of artists -- including Suicidal Tendencies and the Flaming Lips -- put out releases. The cassette may never regain the cachet it had in the '80s, but as an audio medium that's cheap, fun and tactile, there's obviously room for a playback.

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Story highlights

The cassette tape and player celebrate 50th birthday on Friday

Versatile medium was originally for dictation, later included music

Though overtaken by digital media, it's still popular around the world

Recent events, releases have celebrated the cassette

The cassette should have died. Instead, it's turning 50 in an atmosphere of celebration.

That doesn't surprise Dale Wiggins, U.S. head of research for Philips, the electronics and technology company that invented the cassette back in 1963. He reminds people that the cassette was created on the heels of reel-to-reel taping, a bulky technology that required a lot of manual effort.

"All of a sudden you get this small form that you just plug into a player and it automatically achieves everything that used to be so hard and so cumbersome," he says. "It really was a precursor to a lot of the innovations that we have today."

The cassette actually made its debut a little more than 50 years ago, when the "compact cassette" tape and its player were introduced at a Berlin fair on August 30, 1963. But Philips dates the introduction to two weeks later -- September 13 -- when the format was launched in Amsterdam, the company's headquarters.

In the years since, the player and tape have seen highs and lows, from the 1980s ubiquity of personal players, boomboxes and mix tapes to its decline in the era of digital music and streaming radio. It's only in the past few years, with cassettes being seized upon by hipsters and metal bands, that it's entered a mild revival.

Mind you, not everybody is happy about this.

"Dear God, no," said commenter Patrick Butler on a Stereophile magazine article about Cassette Store Day. "I lived through cassettes once, and they sucked. But that's all we had. It was high school. Now it's just a bad joke."

Butler has a point.

Cassettes, which are inexpensive and easy to duplicate, remain popular around the world.

Cassettes were originally invented for dictation, not high-fidelity music. And even with improvements over the years -- better magnetic oxides, Dolby noise reduction, high-quality tape players -- the medium was plagued by audio inconsistences, drop-outs and, for careless users, the dreaded tape snarl. (Get out your pencil and start spinning the spool -- it's going to be a long afternoon.)

Even Wiggins, who's 50 himself this year, admits that the cassette has its faults.

"My memory says it wasn't all that great," he chuckles.

But cassettes have also proved to be remarkably versatile, he says. You could record off the radio. You could share music with friends. You could make lovingly crafted mix tapes -- aural valentines -- for potential romantic partners.

Philips' Wiggins adds that the ideas that company invested in cassette technology continue to be useful today. It's not just audio, either: One Philips technology, Magnotech, involves a medical diagnostic device that takes a small blood sample and, through magnetic nanoparticles, can determine markers.

"That's all based on the same magnetic principles that were used in that original cassette tape," he says.

Is the cassette boomlet peaking? That's anyone's guess. But, next year, there's another technology that's due to celebrate its golden anniversary. Maybe it's time to get ready.